MSA Week 3 - Emily Short's Galatea

EMILY SHORT’S GALATEA

Overview

• A work of interactive fiction
  • Based on the print tradition of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books
  • a multilinear narrative
  • According to Short - “approximately two hundred billion endings”
    • a single non-playing character (NPC) in a single room. The narrative is loosely inspired by the Pygmalion story, for this reason Galatea, dressed in green, stands on a pedestal as part of an exhibit.

• The “She” in this opening passage is the titular “Galatea,” a living statue who stands on display on a pedestal at a place named “Gallery’s End.” She is at once an art object, an object of vision, and, as we shall see, a literal “conversation piece”

• created using the Z-machine, a 1979 virtual machine originally used for the development of adventure games

Textual / Digital Modalities

What is Interactive Fiction?

• a data-base driven piece of writing that is programmed to respond according to a varied, but not infinite, set of possibilities. Also means it has to be played with a very specific set of commands (as we are told in the instructions for Galatea).

• Galatea is written/constructed between the author/statue/reader
  • “text” here is never settled; it is instead shaped and reformed with each reading
  • Short’s description of this work:
    • I’ve said it over and over: I don’t want people playing to particular endings. I want them to play the game and get whatever result comes naturally, because that is what the game is built for. It’s a dispenser of stories, customized to the individual who is playing at the moment. That’s my vision as the author.
  • contrast to many pieces of interactive fiction that offer a series of puzzles to solve

• a game you understand simply by playing it

• ergodic function -> a step up from the chatterbot model of ‘Eliza’
  • The reader controls the narrative direction at each point in the conversation. Which implies that the reader’s decisions are crucial to narrative and character development.
• lack of instruction at each decision point, however, is significant

• The writing is more 'literary'

Analysis / Interpretation

• Addresses the gap between the written word and its reception
  • what if the text could explain itself, from the point of view of its creation
    • removing the question of author fallibility and intentionality (Intentional Fallacy)

• “Galatea” demonstrates just how complicated and important the relation between art and criticism has become
  • furthermore the gap between art and understanding will always require mediation

• Stanley Fish’s idea of Interpretive Communities
  • different readers/users, different paths/conversations

• the power of interaction
  • interaction as cognition vs. interaction as interactivity

• A commentary on the act/art of creation from the point of view of the textual object
  • Very post/modernist, in line with Barthes’ views on reading and poetry

• relating literary practices to works of electronic literature allows for new developments in the discipline